„The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our 'reality' and turning it into a 'global image scenario'. Human beings forget they created the images in order to orient themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their...
„Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.“ source: “Curiosites esthetiques”, „Salon de 1859“, 1868...
“The world is filled to suffocating. Every image is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.” source: „Style“, Vancouver 1982...
„The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.“ source: „Uses of Photography“, in: “About Looking”, London 2009...
„One day, some friends were talking about their childhood memories; they had any number; but I, who had just been looking at my old photographs, had none left.“ source: “Camera Lucida”, New York 1981...
„The speed with which the possible uses of photography were seized upon is surely an indication of photography's profound, central applicability to industrial capitalism.“ „Within a mere 30 years of its invention as a gadget for an elite, photography was being used for police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, …...
“One is no longer safe anymore, they lie in wait for you everywhere with their cameras. You don’t know if you're being shot or photographed.”...
“What one sees in technical images do not appear to be symbols that one has to decode but symptoms of the world. This apparent objective character of technical images leads whoever looks at them to see them not as images but as windows on reality. Observers believe them as they do their own eyes....
„It's no longer man's trembling hand that reproduces the changing scene of this world. It’s the sun itself, the allmighty agent of an all-new art.” source: “Le Daguerotype” [sic], L’Artiste, 1839...
“My only goal was the ultimate kind of deception; I wanted to steal from nature, so I had to become a thief.” source: August Lewald: “Ein Menschenleben”, Band 7, Leipzig 1845...